Search results for 'South'

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The ABC of Tactical Media 

Tactical Media are what happens when the cheap 'do it yourself' media, made possible by the revolution in consumer electronics and expanded forms of distribution (from public access cable to the internet) are exploited by groups and individuals who feel aggrieved by or excluded from the wider culture. Tactical media do not just report events, as they are never impartial they always participate and it is this that more than anything separates them from mainstream media.

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Escaping Assad and Revolution in Rojava 

An interview with a Syrian activist in exile, code-named Sami, published by Occupy.com draws attenton once more to the radical experiment in real-life bottom-up matriarchal democratic design unfolding  against all odds in the autonomous Kurdish region of Rojava in Northern Syria. We are republishing two short texts here on this subject matter to speculate about the question if 'Rojava' could offer a repeatable model for post-governmental political design?

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Governmentality of Information 

The American military network ARPAnet was conceived as a way to maintain uninterrupted communications in the event of nuclear war. Ancestor of the Internet and foundation of the Global Information Infrastructure, ARPAnet springs from exactly the same source as the "push­button war" that lay behind it: the change of scale provoked by the early 20th century discoveries in physics, within an industrial society capable of organizing the productivity - including the scientific productivity - of thousands of agents. Here, no doubt, is the real birthplace of the information society: a society massively penetrated by the sciences and technologies of information and telecommunications, using them to carry out the design of the planet or at least, that of its components (with design replacing politics). A society whose governmentality entails the knowledge of the real, that is to say, the transformation of reality into information. A society whose governmentality unfolds between its smallest common denominators (atomic, electronic, magnetic, genetic, chemical) and its largest common denominators (climate, planet, solar system), by way of laws, formulas and norms that determine its productivity, means, and possible destinies.

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Tactical Media in Brazil - Submidialogia conference report 

The four-day conference on the campus of the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp) brought together many key persons from the tactical media movement of Brazil and some of their counterparts in the Brasilian government.
The movement is converging from roots in free radio, free software, hardware hacking, art and social movements. It is currently focussed around a large-scale project master-minded by Claudio Prado and supported by the Ministry of Culture: ?Pontos de Cultura? (Culture Spots) which is aiming to empower up to 600 cultural projects with free software-based multimedia production and publication facilities.

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Historical Background of the US Biowarfare Program 

In light of the current FBI/Patriot Act investigations against Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), it is worthwhile to point out two moments from the history of the US government?s involvement in biowarfare. The first concerns the specific issue of access to knowledge, education, and resources in the life sciences. The second concerns the general backdrop of US biodefense ideology. All of this information has been confirmed by several sources, and has been in the public domain for some time (see the references below).
Needless to say, this is not meant to be a comprehensive ?history? of biowarfare. Instead, it is a perspective on biowarfare from the vantage point of US involvement. What is evident is that the US government?s involvement in biowarfare raises far more substantial questions than the investigation of dissenting artists.

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Borders: Walking Across, as opposed to Flying Above 

This text was written in July 2003, at the height of the tension on the border between India and Pakistan. Following elections in Pakistan, and in the Indian administered part of Kashmir, the two countries have agreed to de-escalate and troops on both sides are now on their way back to "peace time" positions. Relations between the two governments however, continue to be tense.

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Product Placement in Learning Environments 

Technology companies have a long history of placing their products inschools and other learning environments. The reasons vary. Placement isdone through in-kind donations, competitive grants, achievement awards,and funds earmarked for technology projects. Most of the companies seetheir products as ways to enhance education, and many will claim therevolutionary or transformative nature of their wares. All of them hopeit will be a prelude to increased market-share.

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    Cartography of Excess 

    Utopian ideas - like "Spaceship Earth" - are round, multidimensional, interrelated: their archetypal map is the Milky Way, the infinite constellations. But rational thinking is instrumental, linear, it distorts: and that's exactly the problem with the Mercator map, the most common world projection. Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome, created a "Dymaxion map" to undo those distortions. First the earth becomes a geometric figure, an isocahedron: its 20 triangles are then disjointed and laid flat, so the land masses radiate from a nexus in the north, without splitting continents or enlarging the polar regions.

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    The GHI of Tactical Media 

    Tactical media are the field being worked by artists adopting a positive attitude towards contemporary digital technology, in a critical, innovative spirit. Media artists reveal a preoccupation with aesthetics as a concept, not with a particular style. This trend is part of the creation of a new language for the communications network era, a user language which is successful as art because it transmits an effective activism. Media activists are a hybrid of artist, scientist, theoretician and political activist that shuns labels and categorizations. Their creations are characterised by integration of user and machine in the work itself, so that interactivity has an important place within it. The concept of tactical media allows Art with a capital and grassroots political activism to be combined and, in this sense, we could include in it the tactical struggle that is part of anti-globalisation movements. Media activists point to the power of tactics as a means of breaking down the barriers between mainstream values and alternative ones, between professionals and amateurs and even between people who are creative and those that are not.

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    The End of a Paradise 

    In tactical media circles the Amsterdam media landscape has long been treated as a Utopian model because of her free radios, open tv-channels and digital public spaces. The last few years this media paradise is under threat. How did this come about? And is it still possible to reverse this development? This is the theme of the Amsterdam Media Debate. Nina Meilof (The Digital City - DDS), Andreas Baader and Josephine (Radio Patapoe), Frank (Radio de Vrije Keyser) and media-activists Patrice Riemens, Geert Lovink and Menno Grootveld prepared the grounds for the discussion.
    The aim of the Amsterdam Media Debate during The Next 5 Minutes is to explain to the international participants that big changes are underway here. They may perhaps learn something from our experiences, but we would also like to try and find out what the differences are with other big cities and with other countries. What are these big changes and how is the situation at the present moment?

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    Insular Technologies - A Civil Tactical Response to SIGNIT Communities 

    In the past four years we have been accustomed to receive information on the extent of global signit work that has actually been going on without the knowledge of civil populations, communications infrastructure users and developers and in many cases even governments. A very quiet debate has started around issues arising from the knowledge about the ECHELON system, which has now spread also into mainstream politics, and we should be very careful observers of this processes. One should also be aware of the fact, that possible ?sister" systems exist in the EU countries, Russia, France and China, although not much is known about them, except what can be gathered from each countries encryption regulations, which in this respect can be taken as an information on each of the countries civil rights and signit polices. We can also assume that Israel possesses strong signit mideast oriented capabilities.

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    The DEF of Tactical Media 

    Campaigns and Movements Although a global conference, the first Next 5 Minutes, held six years ago(1993), was dominated by the first large scale encounter between two distinctive cultural communities. On the one hand, Western European and North American campaigning media artists and activists and on the other hand their equivalent from the former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, dissident artists and samizdat activists, still basking in the after glow of the role they played in bringing down the communist dictatorships. In the excitement of discovering each other, these two communities tended to gloss over their ideological differences,understandably emphasising only the shared practice of exploiting consumer electronics (in those days mostly the video camcorder) as a means of organisation and social mobilisation. We referred to these practices, and the distinctive aesthetic to which it gave rise, tactical media.

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    The Watershed in Your Head - Mapping Anthropocene River Basins 

    Translating the abstraction—and banalities—of the Anthropocene into readable cartography has resulted in many past attempts that often ended up reproducing those same qualities. But, as Brian Holmes asserts in this essay, we seem to have found ourselves in a moment where collaboration, engagement, and new forms of knowledge exchange are breaking that deadlock. Tracing his own involvement with artistic practices that both engage with and attempt to represent a “political ecology,” Holmes explains how the evolving, collaborative cartographic practice that brought the "Mississippi. An Anthropocene River map" into being simultaneously reveals and interrogates the power structures of Anthropocence society.

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    Mediate YourSelf! 

    At the end of the third 'Next 5 Minutes' conference on tactical media (March 1999) in Amsterdam, an interesting discussion emerged around the question of how the minor media practices elaborated and highlighted in this vibrant event would ever reach a wider audience for lack of being covered by any mainstream outlet. At one point, some people from the back of the room (unfortunately I don't know anymore who exactly, I believe an Italian group), shouted: 'We don't want to be mediated - we mediate ourselves!'

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    Talking about a Revolution: An Interview with Camille Otrakji 

    "If you've been following events in Syria, you'd know that the English-language press is mostly deeply critical of the Assad regime (while the Arabic press displays a slightly wider range of views). I thought it would be worth trying to present a minority report on the situation from a Syrian friend of mine, although, as you will see, he argues precisely that his position is actually held by a very significant majority (albeit a rather quiet and frustrated majority) of Syrians.

    Camille Otrakji is a Syrian political blogger based in Montreal. Although he tends to keep a low profile, Otrakji has been, for the past several years, at the forefront of many of the most interesting and influential online initiatives relating to Syrian politics. He is one of the authors and moderators at Joshua Landis's Syria Comment, and the founder of Creative Syria, a constellation of websites including Mideast Image (a vast collection of original old photographs of Middle Eastern subjects) and Syrian Think Tank (an online debate site hosting many of Syria's top analysts). Last year, Otrakji courted controversy with a new initiative devoted to the subject of Syrian-Israeli peace, entitled OneMideast.org. He agreed to speak with me about the latest events in Syria, and I'm sure that his views will generate plenty of discussion."

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